Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Kelimutu at last! (Road trip, day 5)

26th November 2011

Got up at 6 to start the journey up to the top of the Kelimutu volcano. You have to ride a few kilometres up, then you reach a car park from which you have to walk up to the summit.

It seemed like the beginning of an episode of casualty (or holby city, whatever its called now) when Greg saw the danger sign at the bottom of a rocky/ clay slope and decided to climb. But he reached the top and had an amazing view of one of the crater lakes so we all followed. No one fell to their death so it was all good. Mario and I went back down and took the path to the other crater lakes like good little boys, but Greg, Alex and Brian decided to go the slightly crazy way which was much quicker but also pretty sketchy! As depicted in the picture below. That small person in the red top is Alex standing at the edge of the crater wall!
We got up there and managed to see the coloured crater lakes just before some really bad weather came in which ruined the visibility and then rained ridiculously hard on us - we dashed down to the first available shelter and shared biscuits with some Malaysian people who were passing themselves off as Indonesians to avoid the extra costs which foreigners have to pay to get in.

On the way down from Kelimutu we stopped in a small village.

On the drive back down we had another moped incident. Brian's rear break locked up when going round a corner, he lost control and crashed into the side of a bemo (a little van used for public transport) which was coming the other way! Somehow he came away with just some missing skin on his leg and the bemo didn't have any damage. The rear break was jammed on and we had to beat it with a rock to free it up so we could continue back down to Moni and get someone to repair it.

The owner of our home stay ended up repairing Brian's moped (everyone seems to be able to repair mopeds here) and we had lunch while he worked on it. After lunch we headed for Ende and spent the night there.